February 22, 2006
Stuart Bailey
Speak Up, a design website, yesterday posted a lengthy interview with my friend Stuart Bailey, a graphic designer in the loosest sense of the term. (Link found via Design Observer.) Stuart is the editor and designer of dot dot dot, a magazine to which I am contributing an essay, as well as one of the designers of Metroplis M, a longstanding Dutch art magazine. Here are a few excerpts.
On moving to New York:
At best [the Dutch] economy maintains a healthy tradition of support, manifest in the healthy presence of young one- or two-person practices, an abundance of small-scale, experimental, low-attendance events, with a budget embedded in every other funded project for printed matter or public art, etc. That’s nice to be around and involved with for a while, and I’d be stupid to think I’ll be able to keep up the sort of work I’ve become used to in New York, which is the opposite situation of large studios, an established art scene directed by money, and little official support for marginal activities as independent publishing.But in the end, of course, there’s also way more crap produced over there, a lot of waste of materials, time and energy, with people taking advantage of the easy ride. It breeds a certain lethargy, and a certain lethargic kind of art and design. There’s exactly the same imbalance of good/bad rigorous/slack relevant/irrelevant inspired/uninspired work as anywhere else in the world—but in far greater quantities. Like swallowing too much sugar, you can only take it for so long before you get sick, and that took me five years. So, as the cliche goes, the head-on brutality of the situation in New York comes with some sense of relief, and I think that’s why I’m here. I’m also looking for an escape route from graphic design.
On his definition of graphic design:
I’ve tried to explain elsewhere how I don’t really see graphic design as deserving of being treated as an independent, navel-gazing discipline. It exists entirely in relation to other subjects. There’s nothing mysterious about this, it just took me a while to realise it. To look at it from another angle, though, I suspect what I’m really against is what that term “graphic design” has come to represent, i.e. synonymous with business cards, logos, identities and advertising, and, again simply put, those are things I’m just not interested in. To me that idea of “graphic design” is as far removed from my interests as being a milkman or a lawyer. In fact, I’d rather be a milkman.
Explaining the editorial vision of dot dot dot:
During one of those frequent resurgences of manifesto-fashion we’d be asked “what do you stand for?,” “what’s your position?”, and it seemed obvious to us that whatever we publish is what we’re interested in. So that’s what we believe in, if you like; it would be more accurate to say we publish material we think worthy of sharing, and that includes the way in which it is presented.
Lastly, summarizing an exercise conducted with students at USC:
The implication of this in terms of graphic design is that any piece of work could be designed in (at least) 99 different ways, using a graphic vocabulary rather than a textual one (or, obviously, both). I’m interested in learning, or teaching, how to be able to recognize and use those different styles in a manner appropriate to each new piece of work, starting from zero every time. That’s exactly what graphic design and modernism mean to me. The sort of work I like and aspire to make is based on this pluralism, intelligently drawing from the whole spectrum of style rather than sticking to one slavishly.
Posted in Around the web, Art, Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 21, 2006
Around the web #7
- At Slate, Daniel Akst asks a simple question: "You have $1. How should you spend it to do the most good?" The answer? "Given all this, it seems to me that the best way to spend a little money helping the world's poorest citizens is not to spend the money at all, but to lend it."
- At The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens elevates his game in discussing Perry Anderson's Spectrum: From Right to Left in a World of Ideas. His often-dismissive tone is here replaced by what seems to be a considered, long-term engagement with Anderson's ideas. The review led directly to my purchase of the book, which arrived in the mail while I was away.
- The Boston Globe presents a brief interview with the critic and novelist William H. Gass, whose new essay collection, A Temple of Texts, has just been released.
It concludes:
IDEAS: Are there people you think do a good job of critiquing you?GASS: Yes, there are some. Mostly they live in Europe. European critics are much smarter. Some of the best critics of American literature are in Germany and France. They know what's going on. They keep up. They have a much better intellectual equipment, a firmer grasp of languages. When I go abroad I feel much more at home. It's that sense of all writing is in the same country, and that there's just one country now.
In November The Believer published a long interview with Gass, reprinted in full here.
- Last weekend's Guardian Review published an appreciation of Ted Hughes by Simon Armitage: "Hughes, for me, was the man from over the top of the hill, from the next Yorkshire valley, and his poems made me want to read. Later, it was homesickness that drew me back to his work, and by that time his poems were making me want to write. I think we shared a nostalgia for the same part of the world, even if that patch of the planet held a different significance for us."
- At World Hum, and in the wake of the James Frey scandal, essayist and short-story writer Tom Bissell re-publishes an essay on the subject of truth in travel writing.
- I greatly enjoyed James Lasdun's "diary", which describes his brief stint as an organic farmer twelve years ago, published in the last issue of the London Review of Books. It makes me want to read his novels, which have been praised left and right by critics I respect, but which have previously flown under my radar. Coincidentally, Identity Theory has just published a long interview with Lasdun conducted by Robert Birnbaum.
- Lastly, this morning I read Francis Fukuyama's eminently sensible essay printed in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Perhaps stung by the ease with which critics used the title of The End of History against him (and which he defends briefly), Fukuyama titles this piece "After Neoconservatism," though it's not without its own strong rhetoric:
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
It is an excerpt from America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, out this week from Yale University Press.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
February 16, 2006
Stockholm: Initial impressions
The city stretches across fourteen small islands, and the wind running along the water gathers so much force that it drives you inside. (Hence my being in my hotel room killing ninety minutes with some old Joan Didion essays from the NYRB rather than out exploring further.)
Unlike, say, Berlin, where one can feel intimidated just walking down Unter der Linden, Stockholm and its buildings are incredibly well proportioned. It is undeniably lovely to walk along its streets.
There must be more hair salons per capita in Stockholm than in any other metropolitan area in the world.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 15, 2006
Larkin around the web
Yesterday I realized that lately there has been a proliferation of articles and weblog posts concerning Philip Larkin. (So did Maud Newton, who commented here.) Much of the activity seems spurred on by John Banville's "homage" in the current New York Review of Books, though I found the article without much merit aside from the revelation that Larkin capitulated to a request from the Countess of Dartmouth to remove an anti-business stanza from a poem she had commissioned. I had hoped for a greater engagement with Larkin's poetry. (To my mind J.M. Coetzee's review-essay on Gabriel García-Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, in the same issue, is a much stronger piece.) Nonetheless Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard has now commented on the article twice (one, two). Elsewhere, the Guardidan reported yesterday that a trove of audio recordings of Larkin reading his poems has been discovered in a garage in Yorkshire, a story that led me back to his well-known recording of "Aubade," one of his last poems. (Click here and scroll down for an MP3 of the recording.) All of this inspired me to spend time with my 1988 FSG edition of his Collected Poems; below is "Ambulances," perhaps my favorite in the volume.
Ambulances
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,
And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;
For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there
At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.
10 January 1961
Posted in Around the web, Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
February 13, 2006
Gratuitous snow photo
A view of 7th Ave. in Park Slope yesterday morning. I walked a mile—each way—in three-foot-high snow drifts to make my first-ever shift at the Park Slope Food Coop.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 10, 2006
Perl on MoMA
I do the reading so you don't have to, this time making my way through Jed Perl's 6,000-word screed about the new MoMA. It is, of course, both suavely written and problematic. Among other things, Perl damns curators that don't agree with his taste and uses slithery language to compliment those that do, in essence crediting them for getting out of the way. ("Jodi Hauptman, the curator in charge, understands that the development of Redon's art . . . has its own dramatic force.") There are two points worth salvaging, however. The first is a criticism that seems to me to have some merit, and that I haven't seen voiced elsewhere so directly:
"Glenn Lowry is the first man to guide the Modern who is not, essentially, a visionary curator. While the museum has had a director whose chief focus is fiscal and administrative for the past fifty years, up until now the leadership structure was essentially bipartite, with the director in fact occupying a somewhat less central role than the chief curatorial figure, whether that was Alfred Barr or William Rubin or Kirk Varnedoe. This unique arrangement originated in the late 1940s and ended in 2001, when Varnedoe, who was in the later phases of a long and unsuccessful battle with cancer, resigned. It was Varnedoe's departure that ushered in the Age of Lowry. Without understanding this essential shift in the leadership of MoMA, it is impossible to grasp the absolutely changed nature of the museum—changes that many people found themselves talking about a few days ago, when Rubin, who retired in 1988, died at seventy-eight."
The other is a criticism mentioned frequently but which remains true more than a year after the museum reopened:
"Almost as soon as the noisy media-drenched re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art was over, a strange silence enveloped the museum and all its doings. To be sure, its shows have been reviewed, and there have been some controversies—about its de-accession policies, about the museum's attitude toward art taken from Jewish collectors during the Holocaust—which museum officials have responded to quickly and vigorously, as if they were making points in a political campaign. The silence to which I am referring is not the silence of the press; it is the silence of the most fervent artists and museumgoers—the men and women who have for decades been the museum's core constituency. These people still pay a visit to the Museum of Modern Art now and again, to see a new show or to look at an old favorite in the permanent collection; but they approach the museum without any particular hope that they are going to be moved by what they see, and when they leave they frequently express neither pleasure nor disappointment. The Museum of Modern Art, an institution that so many museumgoers experienced so personally, is now generally regarded as a faceless juggernaut."
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Enough Is Enough
I second Todd Gibson's call for a condemnation of Charlie Finch, which is predicated on this column at Artnet. One can tolerate, with an eye-roll, an art critic who comes across as either uninsightful (one, two, three) or lecherous (one, two); that Finch consistently displays both characteristics when slobbering over art-world women is reprehensible.